Читать книгу The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish - Katya Apekina - Страница 12

Chapter 3

LETTER FROM MARIANNE MCLEAN TO EDITH AND MAE

[1997]

my dear daughters,

please ignore my previous letter. a familiar itch behind the eyeballs, words not my own.

can you even read this? it’s the medicine that makes my hands shake. please do not be alarmed. tremors & earthquakes in my hands & feet & face. they’ll keep deforming me until there’s nothing left to deform.

every morning, they put me in an ice bath up to my neck. i have never been so cold. a nurse, sadistic bitch, sits & watches my teeth chatter. i’ve developed a nasty cough, pneumonia? but they say some of the fog has lifted. i am writing you girls a letter, after all. my two lovelies. my ribbit & rabbit.

i forgive you & try not to think about you. i’m ashamed, of course. i want to keep you, even thoughts of you, away from this place. the suffering is in the walls, in the floor, under the tables. it’s mixed into the paint. it smells like shit & fear. it gets into your nostrils & then it’s too late because it’s in you. my neighbor can’t stop crying (can’t or won’t?). i have only recently begun to distinguish between awake & asleep. i’ve started writing again. words repeat in my head, the only way to flush them out is to write them down. poems. your father is no saint, but he is a lot of things.

i love you, it’s a bell in the fog, the only thing that still exists.

be brave,

mom

EDITH (1997)

What have they done to her in there? What did I let them do? The paramedics and the police. I should have lied, but I was so stunned. I told them what happened, and then they twisted it.

The man with the gun holsters, pouring me an orange soda into a Styrofoam cup. He was younger than the detectives on television shows, practically my age, wispy mustache. He asked me question after question and stupidly I told him everything, and he rubbed my shoulders and wiped the orange from my mouth with a napkin. Why hadn’t I kept quiet?

I put her in there. She thinks so too. Why else would she need to forgive me? And now they’re torturing her because of what I said. Between the ice baths and the pills they’re giving her, it’s a miracle she can write at all. Her handwriting was always so small, neat, round. She would press down hard enough that it was almost an engraving. You could run your fingers over the paper and feel the words.

Here, though, her handwriting looks like a ghost sneezed. There is nothing in the way it looks that is hers. It could have been written by someone else. Her sobbing neighbor. Some fat slob in a turban. It makes me feel better to think it was somebody else’s hand shaking over the paper, that Mom was just dictating.

I read the letter again, a third time, a fourth time. I start to hear the words and not see them. my two lovelies. my ribbit and rabbit. That sounds like her. The sound of her voice in my head calms me—bell in the fog—even though the things she is saying—tremors… deforming me—are not very calming. I get to the beginning of the letter again, and stop. please ignore my previous letter.

“Where’s the other letter?” I ask Dennis. I never saw it. He must have hidden it from us.

Dennis doesn’t answer me. He’s busy reading over our shoulders. He’s squinting because he’s too vain to get glasses. Has he gotten to the part about him yet? No saint. If he has, he gives no indication of it. I don’t know what she means when she says he’s a lot of things. I assume it’s bad?

“What did you do with the other letter?” I ask him again.

“What letter?” he says, looking down at me with his wet lamb eyes.

Is he lying? Where did he put it?

“She said she sent another letter. You can’t hide things like that from us.” I feel the blood rushing into my face. “It’s not right.”

“I’m not hiding anything! You’re with me all the time. You see me get the mail.” This is true, but it’s not like we pay attention to it. He could easily have hidden it in a magazine, read it later in his room.

“She probably never even wrote it,” Mae says slowly. “She probably just thought she did, or dreamed she did and got confused.” That’s Mae—she’ll take any opportunity to make Mom look foolish. It’s disgusting.

“Or, maybe the doctors held on to it,” Dennis says. “They monitor her correspondence.”

I imagine a doctor unfolding and reading my mother’s letter, and then folding it back and putting it in a manila folder in her file, evidence against her, words she said to us in anger that will now be used to keep her locked up.

“I think you’re lying.” The chair falls backwards as I stand, bangs against the tile on the kitchen floor. Mae puts her hand on mine, but I shake it off. That little know-it-all traitor. No, thank you. She probably knew about the letter all along. Dennis must have showed it to her, and she told him it would upset me too much to see it. Well, I’ll find it.

“Edie, what are you doing? Please don’t touch my desk. Edith!” Dennis follows me into his room. He crouches, gathering the papers I threw on the floor.

“Enough,” he says as I try to swipe at a stack of papers on his bedside table. I open the book he’s been reading and shake it out. A bookmark flutters to the ground, nothing else. “Edith, that’s enough.” He holds me by the back of my shirt, but I leap forward like I’m on a leash. I’m looking at the windowsill. That’s where he probably sat, reading it. Smoking, reading, crying.

“Why is there so much ash in the ashtray?” I say.

He burned it, lit the tip with a match and watched the words melt.

“Edie, stop,” Mae’s voice is quiet. She’s embarrassed. I look at her face. No, she’s not embarrassed, she’s scared. Of me. I place the ashtray back on the windowsill, careful not to spill any of it.

MAE

I was the one who threw out the first letter from Mom. I could hear the whistle of it hurtling towards us, so I intercepted it. This was difficult since I was almost never alone, but desperation makes you crafty. The envelope felt heavy and hot to the touch and it contained ten illegible pages, each word a barbed hook. I skimmed it, careful not to let any of the words catch in me, before I tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. I didn’t want Edie getting any more agitated about Mom than she already was. I wouldn’t say I wanted Mom dead, I’m not a monster, but I wanted her vacuum-sealed somewhere where she couldn’t get to us. In New York I was happy. Happy and safe from her, I thought.

I failed to intercept the second letter. It arrived—narcissistic, well wrought, barely legible, and full of those elliptical riddles that get under your skin and tug. Edie became obsessed, analyzing it to death: What did it signify that nothing was capitalized? Mom’s low sense of self-worth? Her aversion to order? Her artistic temperament? Was she a frustrated creative person with no outlet for her artistic energies? Was this the true source of her unhappiness? Would poetry prove to be her salvation? I let Edie talk and talk about it. I didn’t contradict her, even though I knew that none of what she was saying was true or relevant. She did not understand Mom at all.

The third letter came a few days after that. Edie was already wound up, and she pored over the new one like a cryptologist. It wasn’t really a letter. There was no “Dear” or “Love.” It was a poem. How coy of Mom, how opaque to communicate with us in this way, to demand that we guess what it was she was trying to say, like she was Sylvia fucking Plath.

“What do you think it means? What do you think it means?” Edie kept saying, standing too close and watching me as I read it.

The poem was gibberish, the unpunctuated words together unpleasant sounds, repeated, oppressive. goatman’s goatpelt fur mouth spackle choke grind down water in the throat ears choke. But reading it filled my mouth with the fetid taste of lake water. It made me think of those night trips when Mom would disappear into Lake Pontchartrain and I would nervously pace the shore, waiting for her head to break the surface. I was dry and on land, getting devoured by mosquitoes, but I could only feel the algae squishing under my feet, the black water burning in my nose. Once Mom emerged from the water with an enormous catfish latched onto her arm. On the drive home the fish flapped and struggled in the backseat while Mom laughed so hard I had to steer. She was laughing, but what does that mean? It wasn’t an expression of joy. It was just a sound, like something in her was trying to get out.

“What?” Edie said. “What?” She sensed that I had been able to decode it in some way.

It was clear to me the poem was a suicide note. It might as well have been an acrostic that spelled out: GOODBYE! FOREVER!

How selfish, how grotesque. Why pull us into all that again? We were children. And the text, the handwriting, jerky and weak, it forced me to imagine her in the act of writing, which I also resented. I did not want to imagine her at all, because if I allowed her in, I felt like I would lose myself again. It was better to take this rare opportunity that forced her off of me and leave it that way.

I never told Edie what the poem really meant. I think I made up an interpretation involving mythology and even tried to convince myself of it. But I couldn’t get the images out of my head of Mom floating face down: in a lake, in a bathtub, in the neighbor’s pool. I remember hugging Cronus at night and burrowing my face in his fur, letting his purring replace the static that her words had left in my head.

PHONE CONVERSATION BETWEEN EDITH AND DOREEN

EDITH: Doreen.

DOREEN: Yes, Edie baby.

EDITH: I need to go home.

DOREEN: Go home? Your momma’s not up for that.

EDITH: Can’t I stay with you?

DOREEN: No, baby. I have a lot on my plate right now. My brother’s sick and he’s staying with me. I couldn’t be responsible for another human being.

EDITH: Doreen! I’m 16. You wouldn’t have to be responsible for anything…

DOREEN: Did you call me just to cry on the telephone?

EDITH: Yes.

DOREEN: How’s your sister?

EDITH: She likes it here. She’s very adaptable.

DOREEN: Well, shit, honey. You don’t adapt, you die. Why do you say it like it’s a bad thing? You don’t adapt, you die.

EDITH: …

DOREEN: I’m not going to talk to you if you keep sniffling.

EDITH: Don’t hang up!

DOREEN: I’m not hanging up, Edith. God damn.

EDITH: Have you gone to visit her?

DOREEN: I went yesterday.

EDITH: How was she?

DOREEN: Not great, Edie baby. Not great. It’s hard to understand what she’s talking about.

EDITH: Did she ask about me?

DOREEN: Sure, honey. Sure, she did.

EDITH: What did she ask?

DOREEN: Oh, you know, how you were doing. I told her you were doing great.

EDITH: We’re not doing great. That’s not true.

DOREEN: Edie, sweetheart, I’m tired. My brother kept me up all night, moaning. He’s in a lot of pain. I can’t keep talking in circles.

EDITH: She sent us a letter and a poem.

DOREEN: Well, that’s good.

EDITH: Did she say anything else about me?

DOREEN: She said thank you for that fuzzy bathrobe you sent her. She was wearing it. I could tell she liked it.

EDITH: She wrote in the letter that the doctors are torturing her.

DOREEN: That’s nonsense. You know that’s nonsense.

EDITH: She said they’re overmedicating and deforming her.

DOREEN: You gotta let her get better. You gotta let the doctors do their work. I have to go now, baby. Give Mae a kiss for me, will you?

EDITH: Yeah, okay. Tell Tyrell I said hi.

DOREEN: He’s with his daddy, but I will when he comes back. Bye, baby.

DOREEN

Marianne left you with her messes. Most people walked away, but once in a while she’d find a fool, a fool like myself, who couldn’t. I’ve known her since she was in diapers. My momma worked for her daddy, Jackson McLean. Everyone liked Jackson. After his wife died he hired my momma to help him around the house.

When I was little, my momma spent so much time over there, taking care of Marianne that, it’s true, I got jealous. I had five younger brothers and sisters, and my momma was wasting all her love and affection on a white girl across town. She’d come home tired and lie down. People only have so much to give and Marianne was taking it all. My friends in school, their parents worked for white people and none of them got invested the same way my momma did. I wondered if she was in love with Jackson, and I know my daddy wondered too. Sometimes I’d hear them fighting about it at night.

Because I was the oldest, I was responsible for my brothers and sisters. I made them food when they got home from school. I sewed their clothes when they ripped them climbing fences or being wild. My momma would bring Marianne over sometimes and make me play with her and that was one more chore on my list. My momma never said it, but I was expected to treat Marianne like a little princess. We did eventually become close, just because we were similar ages and spent so much time together. We’d pick blackberries that grew wild in the bushes along the railroad tracks and my momma taught us both how to can them and make jam.

Marianne wasn’t handy and she had no common sense, but she was good at making up stories. She’d even convince herself that what she was telling you was true and eventually you’d start believing it too. The swamps would become fairy castles and witches’ lairs, that kind of shit. As I got older, though, her imagination started to bug me. I could never afford to be strange because I had people depending on me. Being weird is a luxury. I was embarrassed to be seen with her. She’d trail after me and my friends, floating, round-eyed, walking on her toes. It drove me crazy the way she would walk, her heels never hitting the ground. The girl could hardly make herself a sandwich. I finally got into a big fight with my momma about it.

I was my high school valedictorian and I already knew what I wanted from life. I was going to go to college and become a nurse, move out to a big city and make something of myself. I told my momma that I didn’t need spacey Marianne, like a weight around my neck, dragging me down during my last summer at home. Oh, my momma got mad. She never usually laid a hand on me but that time she slapped me with the comb she was using on her hair. Here we were, all of us fighting for civil rights, and this girl was my responsibility? How do you figure? How is that fair? My momma felt we owed something to Jackson. But I think she would not have gotten so angry with me if she hadn’t seen my point.

For years I didn’t hear from Marianne. Both of us left town, got married, had kids. For a while the world had seemed big and anything was possible. I did what I had hoped I’d do: I moved to Atlanta, went to college on a full scholarship, and became a nurse. Then my momma got sick, and I had to move back home to take care of her. She passed away, my husband left me for someone else, and I stayed on here. Marianne had moved back too and I still felt responsible for her. Her weirdness got darker. She wasn’t happy with her husband. They’d fight and fight, loud enough for everyone to hear. I’d run into him at the store, buying paper plates because she’d broken all their regular ones. Eventually he left after she put herself in a coma with pills. Her daughters stayed with me while she was at the hospital and he moved out.

God, she was so selfish.

She’d say, “You don’t understand, Dor, it’s hell.”

Right? ’Cause that ignorant little bitch was the only one who’d ever felt pain.

And I’d say, “Marianne, choose the hell you know over the one you don’t, because it can always get worse.” It’s what my daddy used to say.

She didn’t believe in that, though. She’d say the only hell that existed was the one she was living in.

Her husband left and things got better and then worse again. She put me in charge in case anything happened to her, gave me power of attorney. But I had enough of my own problems, shit: a divorce, a teenage son who wouldn’t talk to me, a little brother dying in my living room. When she tried to hang herself I did what I could. I kept her out of the state hospital, got her a bed in St. Vincent’s, made sure she had good doctors. It’s an expensive place, but I got her ex-husband to pay for most of it and I rented out her house to help pay the rest.

EDITH (1997)

It pricks a little where the water is hitting me, but my skin has mostly gone numb. I am with you. Your eyes are the only things sticking out above the icy water. You are an iceberg. I am an iceberg. We are across the country from each other but our teeth chatter in unison—

“Edie, I really have to pee.” Mae is banging on the door.

I turn the water off and wait. I count to five, shivering. My fingers are numb. They don’t give her the towel right away, I’m sure. The nurses make her wait, those sadistic bitches. They make her shiver like this.

“Edie, come on.”

I pull the green towel off the hook and wrap myself in it before unlocking the door.

Mae pushes past me to the toilet and starts peeing as soon as she sits down.

“Your lips are blue,” she says.

They are. Like I just ate a blue Popsicle. I stretch my lips out over my teeth and look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror.

“You look like someone just thawed you out of a glacier,” Mae says as she wipes and flushes. I move aside and let her wash her hands.

“Jesus.” She touches my arm.

I shrug her hand off. I don’t need to get into it with her.

“Edie, what are you doing? Stop torturing yourself.”

Why should I? Saints whipped their backs raw then wore shirts made of thorns to punish themselves. Cold water is nothing. Cold water is pathetic. But I don’t say this because Mae doesn’t like other people’s feelings. Whenever Mom would get upset you could just see it in Mae’s face, her shutting down. And that’s the last thing I need. Better to be calm, to move slow, then she’ll come back with me.

“Don’t be stupid, Spooks. We ran out of hot water,” I lie, then clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

MAE

Anybody who’s read Dad’s novels could feel the intensity of his obsession with my mother. Obsession like that never really goes away, not when it’s connected to one’s fundamental sense of self. He never said anything about Mom’s letters, but I’m sure he heard her whistle as loudly as Edie and I did, that piercing sound that made Edie come running and made me dig in my heels. How did her letters have this power over us? I don’t know. The desperation was in the negative space of everything she wrote.

Before that spring, I’d never read any of Dad’s books. It had never even occurred to me to track them down at a library or bookstore because until we came to live with him, he hadn’t existed for me. But in New York, I started reading his books ravenously. I devoured Cassandra’s Calling. I read his novels before bed. I wanted to have the rhythms of the sentences inside of me, so that I could dream about them. In my sleep though, all the characters were Mom. Sometimes Mom would turn into a strong wind and pull me somewhere, or sometimes she would jump on my back and try to wrestle me down to the ground. I barely ever saw her face. Sometimes—and these dreams were always the scariest—I myself would turn into Mom, and then I would be on someone else’s back, or turning into a wind.

EDITH (1997)

Mae’s lamp casts large shadows on the wall as she reads in bed. Her fingers rustle the pages of her book. Cronus is lying on my feet, keeping them warm.